Cat power

Fluffy take their cues from the Sex Pistols

by Amy Finch

Fluffy is what little kids name the kitty cat. Fluffy is also four female punks from West London who specialize in a droll boom that's as non-cuddly as it is rudimentary. When they made their Boston debut last week, opening for Steve Jones's Neurotic Outsiders at Mama Kin, they sounded precisely the way they do on Black Eye, their full-length debut (out this Tuesday on the new Enclave label). That is: unsubtle, unvaried, unoriginal, and a ton of fun.

Not given to bloat or bullshit, the women of Fluffy make a big, Pistols-inflected metallic roar. But forget about anarchy or fascism, Fluffy address society's truly salient issues: rotten boys, rotten girls, rotten hangovers, and the value of vibrators. They wear studded collars and black miniskirts, and three of them look bored to death. The fourth, lead singer Amanda Rootes, doesn't do the blasé pose. First of all, she moves around; second, she's smiling as often as she's snarling. A small detail but one that says a lot about her charm. Rootes would do a swell job with a line like "God save the queen/we mean it, man!" because she's got the kind of comic bark that's couldn't ever be serious. (She's particularly unscary when closing out Fluffy's set with a delirious version of the Who's "I'm a Boy," as she did at Mama Kin.)

Since most of the Mama Kin audience were keen on seeing Steve Jones, Duff McKagan, and John Taylor's cheekbones, Fluffy's eight-song set was received with patience but not much passion. Which was fine -- hey, there's an undeniable satisfaction to be had in staring up blankly at the faces staring down blankly from the stage.

Black Eye is better than a Fluffy show because you don't bump up against that wall of studied nonchalance. All you get is a headful of glorious clatter, impure and simple. The disc starts with Rootes's wail of itchy discontent, "Nothing." She's set her house on fire, gone out in drag, ridden a rocket to Uranus, run away to Mexico, jumped off a building -- but nothing makes her happy anymore. The song soars along, the bridge catching your heart for a moment so fleeting and wonderful that it almost hurts. It's one of those split-seconds when crude noise dovetails into something harmonious and unforced.

Fluffy are like that in general -- able to take a potentially oppressive genre and aerate it with enough tunefulness that it doesn't crush you to death. Plus, in Rootes Fluffy have a singer who pulls off a feat that ought to be impossible: she caterwauls at pretty much one pitch from start to finish and manages to be a lot less irksome than expressive. As in "Hypersonic," when she turns one little phrase -- "Oh, yeah" -- into such a hammy, indecent proposal. Then again, that song is about self-abuse with a mechanical device.

In the tradition of Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, Polly Harvey, and countless other musical women, Fluffy's lack of gonads is only a big deal in the sense that it's no big deal whatsoever. Of course, it gives a distinctly feminine tilt to odes to vibrators and physically abusive partners, but Fluffy are way above any sort of martyrdom. When the bassist wears a T-shirt that says "Gag me, shag me" (as she did at Mama Kin), it's a joke akin to all those lewd Cramps numbers that celebrate sexuality, not sexism.

As for bullying boyfriends, the title track pounds along defiantly until the girl dumps the bruiser, accepting no apologies along the way. "I don't need you!" growls Rootes, a proclamation that a whole generation of girls could be emboldened by. Less triumphant is "Husband," in which a possessive oaf engenders a flurry of rage but doesn't get the boot. Fluffy are not ones to overdo the outpourings of whimsy, after all. Macho pigs, it seems, are one of life's headaches, to be endured at one point or another. Kind of like hangovers ("Technicolour Yawn"), sluts who pretend to be angels ("Crossdresser"), and preening tarts ("Cosmetic Dog").

The remarkable thing about Black Eye is not that each song is a repeat of the last one, but that for all its one-dimensional lumbering the disc is such a lark. A good heaping of credit goes straight to Rootes, whose thin bird squawk is so full of naughty allure. She'll never make Covent Garden, but she's sure to make you smile. She couldn't be more campy or coy singing "I Wanna Be Your Lush:" "Tie me down, honey/Make me feel secure/Lift me up, baby/For you I will be pure/I wanna be your kitten/Caress my butt." Hmmm. Maybe being christened Fluffy wasn't so absurd after all.